More and more people are being caught up in a growing
number of natural disasters, a UN agency said on Friday.

The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction said
the increase in numbers vulnerable to natural shocks was due partly to
global warming.

It said 254 million people were affected by natural
hazards
last year - nearly three times as many as in 1990.

The assessment comes as the Caribbean and the US are
being hit by a series of devastating hurricanes.

Drawn to danger zones

Events including earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and
droughts, storms, fires and landslides killed about 83,000 people in 2003,
up from about 53,000 deaths 13 years earlier, the ISDR said.

Releasing its statistics jointly with the Centre for
Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Cred) at the University of
Louvain
in Belgium, it said there was a consistent trend over the last decade of
an increasing number of people affected by disasters.

There were 337 natural disasters reported in 2003, up
from 261 in 1990.

"Not only is the world globally facing more
potential
disasters but increasing numbers of people are becoming vulnerable to
hazards,"
the ISDR said.

The problems, it said, are exacerbated because more and
more people are living in concentrated urban areas and in slums with poor
building standards and a lack of facilities.

ISDR director Salvano Briceno added that urban migrants
tended to settle on exposed stretches of land either on seismic faults,
flooding plains or on landslide-prone slopes.

"The urban concentration, the effects of climate
change and the environmental degradation are greatly increasing
vulnerability,"
he said.